have we met?

yesterday i had a great, long conversation with a dear old friend who i just don't see enough of and one of the topics that came up was that of ol' Abe Lincoln and his proclivity towards the males.  Abe is hands-down one of my favorites, which got me thinking of Thomas Jefferson who I'm equally enamoured with, which got me thinking of time-travel fucks, something i've been meaning to dedicate some serious space to for some time now.  that is, if you could, who would you travel back in time to and just sit right down on his or her face?  imagine what a mark you've made on the world when years later, centuries even, some broad in Brooklyn is writing about the fact that if she could, she'd be banging down the gates to your plantation to, uh, take a tour of the grounds and maybe take a gander at that famous alcove bed, you know?  

what's sex got to do with it?  i don't know - men that thought, whose words stick it to us even today, men who moved [the world under their feet], who charged over mountains and oceans, men who meant it..........God i miss those men.  Jesus, Buddha, Dionysus and all other god-like or spiritual figures are a matter for another day.  

  

stove top

every year, at this time, i sit around a table with my nearest and dearest and we recount the things we are most grateful for.  i try to live in this spirit every day, but really, i just forget.  all the time.  like, ALL the time.  why??  does it really take a plate of deep fried tofurkey steaming in my face to make me realize just how much i love my family, friends, and health insurance?  whenever i'm down in the dumps, everyone's always telling me to adopt an attitude of gratitude and obviously they're right.  my brother says we need to adopt an attitude of what we're not grateful for, and therein change it.  i don't even know where to start in between the two of those.  time for another plate of stuffing.
 

сжала руки под темной вуалью...

in guiding young illiterates to the light, educators often make use of a simple but effective graphic organizer called the "Venn" diagram.  these two intersecting circles are meant to make blooming minds understand how separate entities or concepts can be disparate while nonetheless retaining some conjunctive qualities.  that's the story of my life.  i have two names for this one body - my given, Christian name, which my Slavic-minded (or simply phonetically agile) friends call and know me by, as well as an amero-anglicized reduction of the first syllable of my real name which everyone else in the world knows me as.  how can i possibly live by one name that is so regal and beautiful and conjuring of images of medieval queens in one language, and invoking of bald Jewish men in another???  as if first-generation discombobulation weren't bad enough, where does one truly find the peaceful center of these two intertwined circles in this humanoid case, and why does it have to so painfully extend to just about everything i'm aware of, from personal hygiene to politics?  hair does not ever need to be washed, hair needs to be washed every day.  Americans are awesome, Americans are annoying.  Europeans are awesome, Europeans are morons.  I'm American, I'm European.  I'm European, I'm American.  I'm everything, I'm nothing.  I'm nothing, I'm everything.    

i remember learning that Anna Akhmatova, the famous Russian poet, who wrote such devastatingly beautiful...words, considered herself half whore, half nun.  i remember thinking how perfect that was, that i didn't want to live life any other way.  someone draw up a Venn diagram on that.  

Sūrya Namaskāra - सूर्य नमस्कार

you know what i've been noticing a lot of lately?  the sunset over Manhattan outside my window at work.  i'm kinda obsessed with it.  i'm so obsessed with it that i've begun obsessively taking photos of it, like every time i see it, which is a lot.  aside from being completely unable to understand how i can possibly be at work that late, it's like, holy FUCK are you AMAZING, Sunset.  it's a little strange how desperately I don't want to miss it, as if it might not happen tomorrow, although i guess the more valid question here is probably will *i* happen tomorrow??  i think about how that Sun has been setting right there since time inconceivable, over the dinosaurs, the glaciers, evolutions and revolutions, and now its pretty little pink face is smiling right down on little ol' me.  that kiiinda blows my mind.  

one of the three songs my mother used to sing to me when i was little was "sunshine on my shoulders".  two of my best friends who completely do not even know each other like to burst out with "you are my sunshine".  Rumi said "a shadow cannot ignore the sun that all day creates and moves it"  i just love every little ray.

this below isn't sunset over Manhattan, this is sunrise over a lake in the north.  i watched it rise from the moment i felt it and i was so sad that i couldn't get every second of it on some kind of film in my head forever.  why isn't everything as predictable and perfect as the Sun?  that doesn't make any sense to me.

i am just. not. getting it, God.

break on through

a couple things happened today.  i got back to my blog, and i got my Blackberry back.  in perusing my blog, i realized that i had accidentally published a draft - WHO does that??  it's like having your ass hanging out in the wind for two weeks and no one telling you about it.  like trailing toilet paper from the bathroom on your left high heel around a posh restaurant for two hours and everyone just kinda smirking at you.   that was also me for the past two weeks with the iphone, unhinged, but i see i can quickly get over it.  see "summer of 69" below, it's great really - amended, pulled up, removed from my left high heel.    

so, that's the effect technology has on me.  top-end technology turns me into a raving ADD psycho and i feel like i'm on Mars.  gimme some straight-up streamline super snappy Blackberry email push over bouncy text message notifications any day, and i don't even MAKE money.  in other news, my psyche so rebelled against the iPhone that i actually got sick.  ill as can be.  i sat around sweating it up in fever all day, not even able to think about how i can make my life better, which is pretty all that i'm into these days.  i haven't even been thinking about wars, plagues, pestilence, famines, droughts, poverty, women's rights, OWS, ousted dictators, world energy supplies, tumbling stocks, the crumbling euro, or any of the other multitude of uber-probs that befall this happy little planet and just really eat me up inside whenever i carelessly dare stop for a moment to ponder upon them.  nope, i've just been thinking about myself, and how there's this other side to things, all silvery and shiny, and i feel like i'm standing right at the very edge of some precipice, over which you tuuuumble to get to, that other side.  who says it's scary stepping off a cliff.

this carriage was in front of me in the express line at the supermarket.  seems like a lot of work for something that could be so simple.     

take a bite outta this

sooooo, a couple of days ago, i got an iPhone.  people had been sneering at my Blackberry for way too long and my complex was growing.  everywhere i turned, everyone had an iPhone.  these people had to be onto SOMETHING.  SO, goodbye my Beloved, i left you for another, but these are things we'll all learn from and grow stronger through one day.

granted, it's sleek, it's sexy, it's shiny, it's straight up strutty, and everyone said to give it about 24 hours before the words Blackberry were to leave my mind and mouth forever.  well, it's going on a week now, and once again, i've learned a lesson.  if you're so happy with something, why make a change?  conversely, if you're miserable, you better take a solid leap or deserve the life you'll lead mired in the simple mental anguish of daily existence.  hm.

it turned out that the Verizon store in my neighborhood was completely out of Blackberrys and i was told that i was the first person in the history of the world to demand an exchange from a shiny new iPhone.  on the way home, i took note that every other last sucker on the face of the earth seemed to be staring at their own shiny little fruity screens, which i find beyond ironic considering Apple's big spiel not so tremendously long ago was alllll about busting out of conformity.

hopefully BB will be back in stock tomorrow.  Suckers.

open up and say...............

look how pretty this little pic is, it astounds me really.  it seems so quiet and serene, so much so that who could ever believe that the scaffolding holds a horde of workers, unseen to the lens, drilling and banging so loud i bet you even loud hellish demons take cover.  around them is a bunch of cars and trains and buses and pedestrians, everything just whirwhirwhiring and then beyond that, as you can see, is NYC, not a place known as the quietest place in the world. but this pic, look at it...it's saying why don't you all JUST SHUT THE FUCK UP. shut the fuck up, and LISTEN.

summer of 69

bryan adams is a real douchebag.

up until this past summer, i had absolutely no qualms whatsoever with a certain process called AGING.  in fact, up until about August, precisely, i felt as if i were twelve, but you know who came along?  Mother Age.  she just came jangling right along in her flowy robes and streaming gray hair and jangly bangly bracelets and bony wrists and hands and straight up smacked me, right in the face.  this time last year, i'd be damned if i knew what a good eye cream was; now, i take a nightly bath in one, just in case.

this is what i don't like.  i'm starting to understand that old adage "a good woman is like good wine" nonsense.  men, their features just kind of settle, and the crows feet around their eyes are nothing short of maddeningly sexy.  there isn't a crinkle in this world that doesn't just set me happily right off.  women, MANY WOMEN, i should say, on the other hand...ay.  women become true parodies of their youth - their features sink, as opposed to settling, necks become stringy, or saggy, and animal-like, and i'm not talking gazelles here, and the wrinkles around their eyes are like cracks in a mirror and who's going to tell me that THAT'S even remotely comfortable to look at??  i was never really sure if i wanted to have the kiddies, so it's not like i'm feeling the click tock here, but suddenly, EVERYONE'S younger than me, which makes me think of that other age-old adage, "youth is wasted on the young".  ohhh is it ever, George Bernard, you clever one.

so, what's Bry-Bry got to do with it?  the other day i caught sight of him now, at age 52, and i'll be damned if he is just not a million times more of a smoking hotty than he was on the '87 "into the fire" tour.  how is that possible, or even fair?  i'm going to go ahead and say that it's just not, not either one of those, although evidently it is.

one of the loves of my life is 21 years older than me.  every time i see him, i think he just keeps looking better.  the babes flock to him, and he's fifty six.  i don't even think Demi could do that.

the other day, another Love of My Life - and also, incidentally, a real asshole - told me that i'm just all insecure about my age, which is evidently possible, but i really wonder how assholes age.  by all accounts, it ain't pretty.

this is the sky over Brooklyn a couple of days ago.  if that's not timeless, i just don't know what is.

melts in your mouth

everyone has a junk drawer.  mine is the top left hand drawer of my desk.  it collects pens, pencils, receipts, hand lotion, scissors, half done packs of post-it notes, nail files, nail polish remover, keys, clips, index cards of information that i never ever use, my wallet...

every once in a while, i'll quasi-clean it out, just to sort of see the bottom of it and feel all refreshed, but then it's right back to business again.  truth is, my desk has five other drawers, but i'll be damned if i'm opening any other one throughout the course of the day remotely near the number of times i jerk that special drawer, so for all intents and purposes, that big ol' desk might as well just have come with one.  top left.

i've been looking at everything in life as a metaphor lately.  i just can't stop and i have a sneaking suspicion that my junk drawer seems to be one, as well.  yes, it's a mess, but everything i ever really need is usually in there, all i have to do is jerk that sticky drawer open and rummage a bit.  sometimes what i need is gratefully right on top, sometimes i really need to shove layers of redundant writing utensils aside to find the the telephone number to that place that i wrote down on the back of a magazine subscription card two years ago.  isn't that great?

today, feeling perhaps overwhelmed for whatever reason, i jerked my The Drawer to find a red pen, and i had to literally shove through pounds of candy, and leaves that a child picked for me *to make tea*.  i mean really??  i LOVE IT!!!

what metaphors do you see in your life today?